The last time you bought a big ticket item--house, car, medical services, college education, electronics--did you use the web to do research? 85% of consumers answer "Yes" to this question, but in spite of this, can you name a company that dominates this research space? Viewpoints Network plans to become the leader in providing high-quality reviews for the major purchases in life, and to do this, they are assembling a group of a few hundred online reviewers.
Viewpoints Network was founded by Matt Moog who was with Q Interactive for the last 10 years (last 5 as CEO). In July of 2006, Matt founded Viewpoints. By August Matt raised $4.7 million (a few different Chicago VCs contributed to this) and not long after the operating team was assembled. This crew consists of a few former Q Interactive employees, plus Leon Chism, former Chief Internet Architect at Orbitz.
Dimensions: 7 people x 6 months x TBD
Funding: $4.7 Series A round. Participants included Lon Chow, J.B. Pritzker, Matt McCall
Customers: Consumers making major life purchases
Location: Chicago [Loop] + www.viewpoints.com
There are lots of places to buy international prepaid phone cards, but no one makes it quite as easy as ZapTel. A few clicks to purchase, and your calling code is delivered via email. In additional to simplifying calling card plans, they also provide online management of call records and billing so you can track and refill your account. 
Imagine you own a small, local, offline business, and you've got to figure out where to put your scarce resources against the online marketing. LocalLaunch began by creating RegisterLocal - allowing business owner to distribute their basic profile (address, phone, categories) to all the major online directories with a single entry. They extended the model to a unified dashboard (PAD or Personal Advertising Dashboard) for simplify management of local SEM campaigns across multiple PPC search engines and directories. 
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As a Chicago grocer, it would be exciting to see sales on your bananas up 3% for the month; until you learn that sales for all other Chicago grocers are up 10%. FreshLook makes analysis like this possible with its detailed sales tracking data for fruits, vegetables, cheese, meats, bakery items, and all the other perishable foods. They provide this data to growers, manufacturers, retailers--all parties involved in the perishable food industry.
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The convergence of all the communication technologies is happening all around us: television on your cell phone, phone calls from your computer, e-mail from your cell pocket. Great Software Laboratory (GS Lab) is building an expertise in this area by delivering custom software applications for clients in this space as they patiently work towards a more productized platform.
You're probably reading this on one of the 500 Million PCs where Installshield has helped you add/remove 80% of the software sitting on your hard drive. For PC software developers it eliminates the need to wrestle with the install and configuration issues - a major source of application failures. For you, it provides for an experience as simple as Next > Next > Finish. 